Pearl Springs Field Trip

September 6

China time doesn’t equal India time. Meaning, from the impression I got from my Chinese friends back in Bloomington—and now from the sense I’ve gotten so far regarding how this country runs—China is not set to the same time concept as much of the rest of Asia. The very loose, fluid, flexible idea of time—and timeliness—that I first noticed during my time in India (but later found out extends across much of Central Asia and the Middle East) doesn’t into China, as I was half expecting. No, things here in the PRC tend to run pretty precisely on time. Not quite to the same extent as in its easterly neighbor Japan, but hands down much more punctual than its neighbor to the south, India.

“Mei guo ren zong shi bu an shi…” (“Americans are always late…”)
During orientation week, I heard many such complaints from Tang Laoshi and Ping Ping, the CIEE program coordinators. So I was surprised when the two of them were perpetually running behind schedule during last weekend’s Taishan trip. And again today: I set out from home a bit before 8 AM this Saturday morning when only Ayi was awake to see me off. On the streets, I was surprised to see so many people out and about so relatively early. Again surprised to arrive at the school on time for our departure to the Zhen Zhu Quan, or Pearl Spring, Tourist Park to find that virtually no one else was ready to go. It was to be our first CIEE outing altogether with the Chinese roommates of the students staying in the dorms. But Tang Laoshi and Ping Ping hadn’t arrived yet. Once they did, they had a task for those us who were ready to go: help carry the fixings for our barbeque picnic from the office fridge to the bus.

OK. I joined in the effort. After seeing people carry past tupperware containers brimming with scrumptious sliced vegetables, I was handed a giant bag dripping blood and filled with skewers of steak. Yumm… In the U.S., I’d try and keep as much distance between me and such slabs of red meat as possible. But because 1) it’s harder to keep your distance from meat in China, 2) I don’t want to burden family and friends with special meal preparation, and 3) the way meat is prepared here actually tends to be a lot tastier and suited to my palette than back in the States, I’ve decided to try not to be averse to consuming the stuff while I’m here. But that big beautiful bloody bag made me have momentary second thoughts.

An hour bus ride and we arrived at Pearl Spring Park, then split into groups of 8 for our barbeque. There were roughly 100 barbeque sites to choose from, all in close quarters and, at least during lunchtime, almost all occupied. We found an agreeable site, surrounded on all sides by Chinese families, and luckily, there was more than enough food that didn’t require a second encounter with the bloody bag of beef skewers. Eggplant, pepper, potato, broccoli and cauliflower galore, even bean paste buns and bread and bao.zi (dumplings), were all ready for the barbequing. Now just to start the fire. Thankfully, among our group, we had at least one person competent as both cook and fire-starter: my friend Sarah was our savior. We all ate well. Our group turned out to be better provisioned than some of the others, so our classmates were continually visiting to borrow our supplies—and barbequed goodies—while they were at it. Apparently, the Chinese way to barbeque (or “shao kao,” as it’s called here) requires more than raw meat/veggies and barbeque sauce. We had a collection of condiments: soy sauce, salt, sesame oil, cumin, and, most curiously (and curiously delicious), honey. Each of us was armed with a pair of chopsticks and had quite a feast, enjoying the fruits (and vegetables and meats and grains) of Sarah’s skilled labors.

Having eaten our fill, fresh from the grill, we made our way to the bay of a lake where dozens of bamboo rafts were tethered. At tourist attractions in the U.S., we have pedal boats. At Pearl Spring here near Nanjing, there was a floating fleet of bamboo rafts. Each raft is complete with two long bamboo poles that raft riders can use to propel themselves along by sticking the poles into the thick sludge on the bottom of the shallow lake and pushing. We were set free on our raft to float around the lake. It was a grand old time and a perfect day for bamboo rafting: this was the first time I recall seeing blue sky and sun at the same time since arriving in China.

Soon, we realized we could take the fun to another level: sitting atop the raft was one more mild form of fun. Getting wet and dirty, now that was more my style. Some classmates agreed, and soon several of us had jumped into lake (trying not to think about what it was that made the water so thick, brown, and pungent). I swam around, enjoying the feel of the lake bottom’s one-foot-thick slimy sludge between my toes, paying peaceful visits to fellow students’ rafts. A few rambunctious boys in the group started paying some not-so-peaceful visits, terrorizing and trying to sink rafts of screaming girls, all in good fun of course. Battleship on bamboo rafts, a grand old time!

Our time on the rafts was over too soon, and many of us were in the mood for more daring fun. A short walk from the rafts was a rollercoaster of respectable size and number of vertical drops and loops. It turned out to be expensive and too short a ride, but we decided to go for it anyways: this is a country where you can bargain even for rollercoaster rides.

The ride was too short, yes, but left the contents of my stomach pleasantly stirred up. We still had an hour and a half before the bus ride back to the city, and I realized I still wasn’t sure why the park was called “Pearl Spring.” So some new Chinese friends offered to take me to see the source of the spring and the source of its name. We walked together, passing groups of Chinese families and friends picnicking and fishing and otherwise having fun, to a pond with the most sparkling, clean, inviting, pristine water I’ve seen in China. My friend Ani grabbed my hand and led me over to one side of the pond, started enthusiastically clapping her hands while bending over the water, and urged me to join her. We stood there applauding the water and looking slightly silly. Then, a stream of sparkling bubbles emerged, bubbles that looked like… why yes! Pearls! I could see now how the spring got its name.

Speaking of bubbles, on our way back to the bus, Ani bought a bottle of bubbles for blowing. The outing was, in many ways, reminiscent of the school field trips I used to look forward to as a kid (that is, until the steel mill in my community—the main fuel for the local economy and source of funding for the schools—went bankrupt and my the Duneland School Corporation called a ban on field trips…), but with a Chinese twist. At least in this part of China, the urban and suburban areas and tourist resorts like Pearl Spring Park built for people living in those parts to visit, things don’t seem quite as exotic as I did and you might imagine. But, as I’m finding out, there is not just one China but many. Most basically, you can say there are at least 2 Chinas. A dividing line can be drawn between urban areas like Nanjing and the rural countryside, where roughly 755 million of the population live under conditions much different than those found in cities. That’s one of my goals over the next semester: get a taste of not only the urban China that’s vaguely reminiscent of urban America, but also the countryside where over 2 times the population of the U.S. live in what might as well be a whole different world.

On the bus ride back to the city from Pearl Springs, this idealized form of the countryside made to suit the tastes of Chinese tourists from the city, I sat next to a Nanjing U student studying Sanskrit in addition to his majors in Chinese and linguistics. I asked why he was studying such an obscure and no-longer-spoken—albeit interesting—language (I can certainly understand the allure, being a foreign language fanatic myself). He explained, all in Chinese, and this was the gist of it: in this very populous nation, a lot of young people now feel an urge to do something different, to define themselves as individuals in this country in which, under Mao’s communist regime, the collective was emphasized over the individual, sameness was encouraged over uniqueness. He had no desire to go to India to further his studies, or to be able to read the Buddhist texts for which Chinese first became students of Sanskrit. But in this nation of over 1.3 billion people, he desired to do something different. In the U.S., on the other hand, studying Chinese—the world’s most widely-spoken language—can be considered a relatively rare endeavor.